I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
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Here's A Tool To See What Your Email Metadata Reveals About You

Earlier this week, Mike Masnick of Techdirt complained that anyone who dismisses the NSA’s collection of metadata around people’s phone calls and emails (as revealed in the SnowdenLeaks) “because it’s ‘just metadata’ doesn’t know what metadata is.” The argument is that you can learn a lot about who a person associates with and what they might talk about without actually reading their emails or listening to their phone calls. Coincidentally, MIT Media Lab released a tool this month that allows people to analyze their own email metadata. Called Immersion, it scrapes a user’s Gmail account looking only at the metadata (From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields of the emails) to present an overview of their network.

If you’re comfortable handing over that data to the MIT Team — they promise to let you delete it — give it a try to show what it reveals about you. The team tells me that 210,000 people have run the tool so far. I’m one of them. Here’s my own Immersion chart showing my network dating back to 2004, when I started using Gmail. I’ve removed my contacts’ names (for privacy reasons!) but labeled some of the nodes and clusters. Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at MIT, was less inhibited in sharing his contacts.

It’s worth noting that this tool only works because of our tendency to archive everything. I’ve saved over 70,000 emails rather than deleting them.

My email volume was highest in 2009 and 2010 when I used my personal account for work purposes. What stood out to me was the patterns in my clustering. Significant others are easy to identify and it’s quite easy to find some of my story sources — which could potentially be interesting to a snooper — as they were disconnected from the rest of my networks.

If nothing else, the tool is a way to quantify who matters to you, and thanks to a sliding time scale, you can see as certain people rise and fall in importance to you; their bubbles swell or shrink or fade away. Even though it’s just metadata, getting that perspective on my social network was almost as poignant as time traveling through old emails and gchats — an experience described too well in this Thought Catalog post from 2011.

The tools’ creators say its release was not related to the NSA revelations, but they do say they hope it will make people think about privacy. “It helps explore privacy by showing users data that they have already shared with others,” says the site.

I asked them what they mean by “others” here. “The other party that the user has already shared his/her data with in this case would be Google, as we are currently using Gmail as the email provider,” says Deepak Jagdish of the MIT Media Lab by email.

Thanks to the way we live today, when most of our digital communications rest with third parties, we are constantly leaving digital trails with them that reveal much about us. Google infamously made its users’ most intimate clusters of Gmail contacts public when it launched the social network Buzz — a privacy mistake it came to regret. And of course, it’s now becoming evident that those trails are of interest to intelligence agencies.

If you don’t use Gmail, you can perform a similar analysis of Facebook using a tool from Wolfram. So, what does the Immersion team plan to do with all this valuable metadata handed over to it by navel-gazing users?

“Our primary reason for allowing users to save their metadata is for a faster launch of the visualization when they visit next time,” says Jagdish. “Apart from that, in the future we also plan to calculate some aggregate statistics for all the users who have saved their Immersion profile, but at no point will we publish any data of any personalized form.”

Still, you might want to delete your data after you use the tool, if you do indeed worry about your privacy.

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Despite the assurances that only metadata is being collected, here is an article that shows how even this apparently mundane information can be used to track the location details of our lives without actually gaining access to the content:

Aye. I have multiple on top of multiple email address’ and that was clear in looking over my results. What is more, take this system as an example of how even a company like Facebook could well be stuck with grossly inaccurate or incomplete data on massive user bases. Think of how somebody intentionally manipulating his or her data could create accounts that “meta fish” for connections. Create a Facebook account and let it search a prepared database of email contacts and those people start getting asked to add you by FB. Some will say yes, not knowing any better. Then you have a hook.

Consider how useless so much of user data can really be with Facebook. I point to Facebook because Gmail can cross-link email archives, search results, and far more data to validate results. Facebook is struggling to do that by all accounts.

The story here is how you can both be tracked and fool the trackers if you have some idea of what you are doing.

Thanks for the article, Kashmir. While I did have the opportunity to work with Jagdish and Daniel, Cesar Hidalgo is the professor who oversaw the Immersion project at MIT’s Media Lab. Thanks for featuring the tool.

I’ve heard about this Immersion tool by MIT team over Google+ however still not given a try. When we use any service provided by third party (like Google, facebook, outlook etc.) we actually sharing our data first with them and then with others via this services so, there’s no actual privacy though companies claim it. It’s up to us where to draw our privacy line while using any online social media networks.

Metadata is very dangerous, it always shocked me that people dismissed it so quickly as meaningless.

Here are some things to ponder. If you take a recent NYTIMES article at face value that there are only 4.37 levels of separation between all people in America and the idea of the “connector” in Malcolm Gladwell’s book tipping point. Things become interesting.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/four-degrees-of-separation/.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s, Tipping Point, he speaks about a group of people that are known as “Connectors”. These people have the uncanny ability of bringing disparate groups of people together. They are collectors of people and seem to know everyone.

http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/tp_excerpt2.html

It is not a stretch to assume that most of the people that the NSA and other law enforcement agencies are trying to surveil reside in large cities. These same large cities would also be where most of your connectors reside just due to the fact of most of the American population resided there. It is also very possible that these “connectors” might unknowingly be familiar with questionable people. why do I say this, quite often these people of interest come from highly skilled professions or are socially well connected (engineers, doctors, sons of doctors, finance, sons of royalty, etc).

With all this in mind, it is probable that these innocent “connectors” have also been swept up in this trawl. Not only is it possible that these innocent “connectors” were swept up, but all the acquaintances of these connectors as well.

Take the test that Gladwell has on his webpage and then think about how far this trawl might actually affect innocent people.